>>18850You are describing a different type of "minimalism" than (what I consider to be) actual minimalism.
Taking the bluescreen as example: it isn't "minimal", it includes useless graphics like the smiley and, as you noted, the utterly unhelpful text.
Compare with the other bluescreen: it includes some actual instructions and technical information to help troubleshooting. It also doesn't try to be fancy, it's just plain monospaced text on a plain blue background.
Same with modern UIs: they're not actually "minimal", they're way more complex than old-style UIs and includes lots of useless animations. It's especially apparent with many websites includes tons of JS garbage when just writing some HTML manually (or using pandoc to convert Markdown or whatever) is plenty for presenting static information.
Another related thing that bothers me is "simplicity", like how GUIs, "visual programming" or whatever is supposedly better than plain text shells/editors when the actual issue is that people fail to grasp how their tools function. No amount of bandaid can fix lack of understanding.
It bothers me how terms are applied to things that are anything but what the term describes. It makes it hard to communicate. I'm digressing though.
